Designing or redesigning a website is not as simple as coming up with the color scheme, graphics, and font styles. It’s ultimately about user experience and conversion, whether it’s an ecommerce site or a simple landing page that encourages subscription to a service. To achieve the level of success that you want and expect, it’s more than likely your website will have to go through redesign after redesign to arrive at its optimized final version.
In any case, the goal with each new iteration is always performance improvement. That’s where A/B testing comes in. It provides irrefutable user data for every design decision to ensure that time and resources are not wasted on changes that won’t make much of a difference in the website’s performance.
What Exactly Is A/B Testing?
A/B testing is known by many names such as split testing and bucket testing. While this type of test has been around for a while, these days you often hear about A/B testing when companies are about to roll out new apps and updates. But what exactly is A/B testing?
Essentially, A/B testing is about comparing two versions of an app, program, or website to determine which of the versions users prefer the most. A/B testing limits the variation to one element, ensuring low variability for easier data validation. In addition, this strategy limits bias and maintains the integrity of the test results.
In A/B testing a website design, the difference between the two versions could be as simple as changing the color of the “Add to Cart” button or the messaging of the content to see which option users prefer. Limiting the variation to one element eliminates other factors that may affect user behavior, keeping the data clean and consistent.
In this article, you can explore the reasons why A/B testing is prioritized in web design services so you can decide if you need to implement this type of testing on your website.
Design Decisions Based on Data
In A/B testing, you can eliminate false assumptions and avoid wasting time following design trends that may not even fit your specific brand. With a sensible scientific approach, A/B testing can reveal which of the two designs work best based on the user data.
Instead of implementing changes based on subjective views, you can make solid decisions that are supported by statistical evidence.
Drive Growth and Increase Revenue
Almost every business website’s goal is to grow the brand and increase profits. With help from properly designed and executed A/B testing, your website can achieve these goals. After all the data is collected and interpreted and the changes implemented, your website should be able to pull in more leads and convert more customers, thus increasing your company’s bottom line.
Minimize Conflict with Clients
Designing a website often involves more than just the professional web designer. For some web design projects, the client’s input may conflict with the designer’s expert opinion. Fortunately, these design conflicts can be resolved with A/B testing. With unbiased data-driven numbers, clients and designers can agree on a design that’s proven to work and move on to the next decision. Aside from minimizing friction with the client, A/B testing also facilitates a more efficient workflow.
Improve User Engagement
Build a loyal customer base with a seamless user experience at every stage of the user journey. From the moment your site loads to the checkout page, customer satisfaction should be a top priority. What’s more, smooth transactions with fast-loading pages and unbroken links help convince customers to continue availing themselves of your business’s products or services.
While your site might not perform that well in the beginning, A/B testing can optimize it according to your customers’ preferences, eventually turning it into the best-performing version it could be.
High-Value, Low-Cost Strategy
Another reason why businesses prefer A/B testing is because of its high-value result at a relatively low cost. Most of this cost will likely come from the off-the-shelf A/B testing tools and apps available online. What’s great about these tools is that they are mostly subscription-based, and they are priced depending on the number of users to be tested.
While it’s true that performing this kind of test properly may be tedious since variations are reduced to single elements of a page, the results are reliable, consistent, and worth the wait.
Implementing A/B testing on your website is a powerful strategy to get your site’s performance up and converting beyond your expectations. At the start, it could be a tedious affair, but if you get it right, you won’t need to redesign your website for many years.
Meanwhile, existing business websites suffering from poor performance will also benefit from A/B testing before implementing updates. It will ensure that the changes to the website will result in statistically significant improvements in terms of design and functionality.
